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Henry Louis Gates

A Failure of Scholarship?

by Sid Parham on August 19, 2009 · Comments

in cultural studies

To rename is to revise, and to revise is to Signify.–Henry Louis Gates, Jr

In his best known and perhaps best piece of scholarship, The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates traces the development of a distinctly different African American rhetoric. He begins with Yoruba praise songs and traces this development through slavery, many writers and even Mohammad Ali.  Indeed he talks about the “trope a dope.”  African Americans developed a double voiced rhetoric full of both hyperbole and hidden meaning which was designed to mean one thing in the speaker’s community and another in the wider world. Presumably then Gates knows whites hear certain rhetoric differently than African Americans do.

We can imagine the good professor, tired from his Chinese journey, trying out a little trope a dope on the policemen who missing the irony, as Gates’s theory predicts he would, arrests the professor.  Part of my enjoyment of this event has been the way in which knowledge has been rendered useless by “signifying.”  For African Americans, including the president, the arrest was an absurd example of what happens too often to African Americans.  Its value as a signifier exceeds its value as an individual event.

The white press pretended the event had no “signifying power,” and examined it as a single event.  Of course, the president’s remarks were seen as symbolic and “inappropriate.” A similar fate befell Jeremiah Wright whose preaching, or at least the clips I saw on television, were full of signifying and in that sense no different from many other African American preachers. Consistently whites tend to hear only the single voice of a doubled voice and to miss the riffs and syncopation.

This issue ended not by court resolution, not by a journalistic transcript of every word spoken in the Gates house that evening, but in a flury of signifying.  The White House garden was turned into that most American of summer places–the patio beer party. The vice president was there to equalize the racial balance and we had that most American of solutions the face to face sit down.  All done as a silent movie.

The lack of any honest dialogue about the remaining racial tensions in this country have made us very sensitive to those events, utterances, and acts that signify those differences and tensions with discussing or resolving them.  The signifying monkey will be with us along time.

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Thank God in my Lifetime

by Sid Parham on January 19, 2009 · Comments

in Politics

WASHINGTON - JANUARY 07: U.S. President Georg...
Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I began this series of posts asking how I could bring the importance of Obama’s election to the students at The Family Foundation School.  The answer I seem to be providing is to share our experiences with them, to show that history is series of lives lived and examined, not dusty reports of events.  I want to skip now to this past year and the elction itself.

I started the year a Clinton supporter.  I well remember Jimmy Carter and Obama seemed an honest, well meaning, but inexperienced candidate. As the campaign went on, I became more and more impressed with his vision and his self control.  The Jeremiah Wright controversy and Obama’s speech about Race in America made me a supporter.

Anyone who has spent time around African-American churches would not have been surprised at Wright’s rhetoric and anyone who had read Henry Louis Gates’s  The Signifying Monkey would have had a context in which to place it.   To a certain extent the Wright controversy brought up some of the cultural contradictions in the country.  It also challenged the role of the church in politics.  People who were happy that their church spoke out became increasing uncomfortable after the YouTube video of Wright’s sermon.

Obama faced this issue head-on which is the first thing that attracted me to him, but more importantly he made it personal.  He talked about his experience and about his white grandmother, who he reported had said things about Blacks that hurt him personally.  He also acknowledged this woman’s love for him, her support of him, and the good she had taught him.  Suddenly there was a model and permission for all of us to move forward without forfeiting our love of our personal past, a way to move apart from our family’s racism without denying our love for them.  They were of their time.  We are now and we live in a country where those ideas and feelings are no longer viable.

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